‘Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror’ – Chris Priestley (Bloomsbury)

There’s no better time to read ghostly tales of terror than when there is no-one else in the house, the wind and rain are howling outside and the sky is pitch black… Okay, I did read ‘Tales of Terror’ at about nine o’clock this morning (when the sky wasn’t dark at all!) but the wind and rain were howling and I was all on my own…

When I wasn’t reading sci-fi and fantasy at school (primary school and high school) I would invariably be drawn to the horror section in the library. There was just something about books with rotting skulls on the cover that made me have to pick them up (I was that kind of child)! More often than not these books scared the life out of me and one particular story had me cowering in bed convinced that something was lurking on top of my bookshelf…
It’s been a long time since I’d read any young adult horror and the arrival of ‘Tales of Terror’ seemed like a good opportunity to find out whether it still has the power to make me jump and look nervously over my shoulder.
It does…

Edgar doesn’t really get on with his parents, preferring instead to spend his time at his Uncle Montague’s house listening to his Uncle’s stories. One day though, Uncle Montague tells Edgar a particularly chilling set of tales, all of which are connected to objects in his study…
What is the connection? Edgar is about to find that the answers to his questions might just be in the woods outside rather than in the study with his Uncle…

As you have probably guessed by now, ‘Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror’ is a collection of the very tales that Edgar is told by his Uncle that night. The mood is already set by Montague living in a forbidding looking house in the middle of a dark forest and this is built upon in a set of tales that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Really, they did…

If you’re a child in one of Priestley’s short stories then it’s very likely that something terrible will have happened to you by the end of the story. None of these children are innocent (and perhaps this meant to serve as a moralistic cautionary note for younger readers) but there is still something deeply unsettling about seeing young children fall foul of supernatural occurrences. And they do, they really do… Priestley draws the reader in with every story, telling us all about the main character and dropping very slight hints about what is to come. Just when you’re least expecting it, Priestley pulls no punches with what finally happens to the children (whether they die or merely go insane). ‘The Demon Bench End’ and ‘Offerings’ are really nasty examples (in a good way) of a descent into insanity through terror and these were the stories that appealed to me the most. The stories that resulted in a chilling end weren’t bad either, ‘Climb Not’ shocked me with an ending that I never saw coming…

As with any collection of short stories not all of them worked for me, I didn’t quite see the point of ‘The Path’ which wasn’t as clearly told as the others. This was a shame particularly because the final story (which promised to reveal the terrifying truth behind it all) came across as a bit of an anti-climax when compared to the others. It just wasn’t that scary…

‘Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror’ was a particularly creepy read though. Thinking about it, I’m glad I didn’t read this one when it was dark…

Eight and a Half out of Ten